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de Blasio
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an ambitious plan this week to make the city a favored home for new high-technology jobs with a commitment to guarantee every neighborhood in the city is wired for high-speed Internet access.
de Blasio’s remarks came at the opening of the city’s “Internet Week,” an event promoting innovative uses of broadband.
“We take an energetic view of helping this sector grow,” said de Blasio. “We can’t continue to have a digital divide that holds back too many of our citizens.”
The mayor noted Harlem will be the home to the nation’s largest continuous free-access Wi-Fi network when it is completed.
“This will bring free Wi-Fi to 80,000 people between 110th Street and 138th Street,” de Blasio said during a news conference on West 18th Street in Manhattan. “And it’ll be a great model for us going forward.”
Under the former Bloomberg Administration, New York City already announced several other regional free Wi-Fi hotspots, in various stages of development:
Brooklyn:
- Fulton Street corridor
- BAM Cultural District
- Brownsville
- Downtown Brooklyn
Manhattan:
- Flatiron Districton
- Along the Water Street Corridor
- East River waterfront
- 125th Street corridor in Harlem
- Roosevelt Island
Queens:
- Long Island City
Staten Island:
- St. George commercial district
Bronx:
- Fordham Road
Harlem will be the home of the nation’s largest free-access Wi-Fi network when it is completed. The new network attempts to reduce the digital divide by including computer-equipped mobile vans that the public can use to access the Internet even if they lack a computer at home. But as NPR reports, these types of projects have often run out of steam in the past, especially if the project cannot keep up with maintenance and upgrades to meet future needs. Dec. 23, 2013 (6:17)
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de Blasio also announced his intention to explore converting 10,000 of the city’s barely-used pay phones into Wi-Fi hotspots.
To coordinate this broadband renaissance, the mayor announced a new broadband task force will study universal broadband to help the nearly one-third of New Yorkers who currently do not have high-speed Internet access, including many in the city’s public housing developments.
But the mayor may find the city will have to pay for broadband improvements itself. Time Warner Cable and Cablevision cannot be compelled to provide Internet access outside of the terms of their franchise agreements and it will be years before Verizon has deployed its FiOS fiber network throughout the city. Neither provider can be legally compelled to offer a low-cost Internet option, although Comcast and Time Warner Cable both have discounted access available to families with school-age children that qualify for federal assistance programs.
